How to Use Airdrops for Crypto Marketing and User Acquisition

An airdrop is a marketing event dedicated to promoting new and developing crypto projects, aimed at attracting new participants and stimulating activity within the community. It usually consists of free distribution of tokens in exchange for performing certain actions. However, despite their apparent simplicity, not all Web3 projects manage to achieve the goals that were assigned to their airdrops. Below, we, the Coinband team, will tell you how to get the most out of airdrop marketing.

What Are The Main Types of Airdrops?

There are several types of airdrops, each of which is intended for different purposes:

• Standard, when the project team distributes its tokens for free among holders of certain cryptocurrencies, such as Ether or Bitcoin;
• Bounty, when users can receive tokens for completing certain tasks, such as subscribing to the project’s social networks, reposts, reviews, etc.;
• Holder, when tokens are received by users who hold project coins;
• Exclusive, which is available to a limited number of users who have previously shown the greatest activity in the project's crypto community.

As we can see, each of them is aimed at performing certain tasks, so before organizing an airdrop, make sure that its concept corresponds to your business strategy, too.

Problems That Airdrops Can Solve

Before planning and launching an airdrop, you should understand what goals you want to achieve with this crypto event. In particular, here are the main goals that can be the basis for this marketing technique:

• Attracting new users, even those who were not previously familiar with the project;
• Increasing awareness of the crypto project through social networks and crypto communities;
• Strengthening the community by increasing the involvement and loyalty of its participants;
• Stimulating activity on the project's platforms, be it trading, staking, or something else.

How to Conduct a Successful Airdrop

A successful airdrop is always a well-thought-out event, which can be divided into the following sub-stages:

• Defining the target audience. The target participants of the airdrop can be, for example, both existing users of your project and new users who do not know anything about it. They can also be holders of certain tokens.
• Selecting requirements for participants. Most often, this involves attracting new users through referral links, subscribing to the project's social networks, completing certain tasks (reposting, commenting, testing the beta version of the platform, or something else), and/or having a certain number of tokens in a crypto wallet.
• Selecting a platform. To conduct an airdrop, you can use both social networks and specialized airdrop platforms like CoinMarketCap, Coingecko, or AirdropAlert. It may also be useful for you to publish information about the upcoming crypto event on your project's website or a specialized landing page.
• Verification of participants. To avoid airdrop participants creating fake accounts, you will need to implement KYC policies to verify the identity of the participant and launch a mechanism to limit one participation from one wallet.
• Token distribution. Make sure that you have a clear token distribution mechanism and that tokens arrive in the participants' crypto wallets on time. Automation using smart contracts will help you with this. 

How to Promote an Airdrop?

To ensure that your Web3 project gets the most out of your airdrop, you will need to put in a lot of marketing efforts, including:

• Social media promotion, including running contests and giveaways for participating in the airdrop, collaborating with crypto influencers who will promote your airdrop to their followers, and viral marketing, which involves motivating users to share information about the upcoming airdrop to receive additional bonuses or tokens;
• Placing on popular crypto platforms – we have already talked about this before, so let us just clarify that this approach will help you reach a wider audience of potential participants;
• Writing press releases and articles for crypto media, as well as publishing educational content on your website, in your project community, or in its official social networks;
• Analyzing and improving the chosen marketing strategy, which consists of assessing the growth of new users, their activity level, aspects of their behavior, etc. – ultimately, all this will help you adjust future airdrop campaigns, making them more and more effective.

Generally speaking, all these actions require different skills from those who will perform them, so to achieve the best results, you should consider collaborating with a professional Web3 digital marketing agency.

A Few More Words

As we can see, airdrops are an extremely effective tool for crypto marketing and attracting new users. At the same time, this thesis is true only with the correct organization of such crypto events. Therefore, if you would like the resources invested in conducting an airdrop to pay off in full, contact Coinband, and the results obtained will exceed your wildest expectations.